Here's my main character. I plan on putting up a much smaller sheet for Edgar later.

[hider=John "Cook" Kaye]Name: John “Cook” Kaye

Age: 34

Race: Caucasian

Sex: Male

Skills: John’s foremost ability lies in his experience with the chem trade. Given the right ingredients, John can make most chems commonly peddled throughout the Commonwealth, along with a couple of homemade concoctions with rather unique effects. Given his career, John knows how to defend himself well enough in the wasteland, and can fire and maintain a firearm just as well as any other wastelander. On top of this, John has an independent interest in the inner workings of the human mind, though some of his theories and beliefs aren’t necessarily accurate.

Physical Appearance: John is a rather small and neat man- not at all what one would expect from someone in his line of work. 5’7 and a twig to boot, John hardly weighs over 100 pounds, and looks frail enough to be blown away by a particularly strong Radstorm. His poor health and chem use has left him with a rather pale skin tone, with his veins popping through his skin. Commonly seen with a bloody handkerchief to help keep his face free from the blood left behind by nosebleeds and coughing fits, John is not necessarily the picture of perfect health.

His face is dominated primarily by two features, his wild mess of dark brown hair which, when down, reaches his collarbone, and his sunken, somewhat off putting eyes. Sleepless and accompanied by bags, John’s eyes are almost entirely dominated by pupil- an odd side effect of his near-constant use of the chem ‘Breeze’. Aside from this, John has a rather common, if ever-so-slightly feminine face, with a fine nose, clear complexion, and wide mouth set with shining white teeth.

Personality: John, better known as Cook, is a rather aloof character, though not necessarily in an unkind way. Even though his mind is oftentimes somewhere else entirely, John values friends and relationships highly, caring relatively little for personal wealth. He thrives in larger groups and, above all else, enjoys bringing happiness to others. Sometimes this is with a joke or a kind word, but many times he accomplishes this by introducing people to the various forms of sin which he finds pleasure in.

The fact of the matter is that John is rather dependent on the chems that he takes. His chem use shields him from the pain of old wounds, both mental and physical. This can occasionally put John in a rather different state, sometimes turning him into a rather frightening individual, those these episodes are rare. Furthermore, his moral compass appears to be slightly off, by some people’s standards. His chem peddling has ruined the lives of many, but he denies any responsibility for this. In addition, he has shown his disconnect from what's right and what's wrong with his experimentation on his friend and slave Edgar, whom he has deeply affected for better or for worse.

Despite his chem use, John is a rather intelligent man. He has a love of pre-war literature, specifically poetry, and views the world through a somewhat romantic and tragic lens. The effects of long-term psychedelic chem use mixed with this particular world view can sometimes make for some… interesting hallucinations.

Possessions: A couple pairs of jeans and a small wardrobe of t-shirts, button-ups, and flannels. A somewhat intact tan pre-war suit, a pre-war diver’s watch, and an assortment of pre and post-war handkerchiefs. As far as weapons go, John has a well-maintained 12.7mm pistol, though he has struggled to find usable ammunition for it. John does not possess any armor.

Along with his personal effects, John has in his possession a small library of prized pre-war books, a number of pre-war medications, a cache of chems and their ingredients, and a respectable purse of caps to start his business up.

(Previous) Occupation(s): Chem cook

Faction: Unaligned

Backstory: Born in Megaton, John was the son of Harry and Margaret Kaye, a guard and seamstress, respectively. The younger of two siblings, John stuck to his older sister, Catherine, for the entirety of his young life, and grew rather close to her. Even as a child, John was sickly, and not expected to make it to adulthood without close care and an expensive medicinal regimen. While John is still unaware of the exact details of his illness, it appears to be a mutation involving his heart, paired with a bad case of gall bladder disease. No matter the details, John was subject to a great deal a ridicule from those his age in Megaton, picked on due to his sickly appearance and inability to defend himself.

Protected by his dear older sister, John struggled to adulthood with the aid of the local Doctor Hardin and a good deal of help. Too weak to follow his father’s footsteps as a town guard, John was left to forge his own career- a daunting prospect considering his lack of contacts and health issues. Thankfully, all of his time spent with Doctor Hardin had lead to one of his few friendships, and when John had some trouble finding work in Megaton Doctor Hardin took him on as an assistant and apprentice.

It didn’t take long for John to ruin this perfect opportunity, however. One day, out of curiousity, John stole away a small amount of drugs from Doctor Hardin’s stores- painkillers, at first. John’s entire body constantly ached due to bad circulation and other related issues, and these ended up doing more than take the edge off. John, as it turned out, had a rather addictive personality, the next few months would be a terribly exhilarating blur for him.

John stopped sleeping. The chems helped him with this- uppers when he needed energy, and downers when he felt like he needed rest. It hadn’t taken long for John to move from simple painkillers to nearly every enjoyable piece of the Doctor’s arsenal, and he loved every moment of those days. While it still remains a haze for John, it is clear that Doctor Hardin found out about his problem pretty quickly, kicking John out and causing his parents to disown him. Meanwhile, John’s sister, who had always been there for him, helped out once more. She herself had fallen in with the rougher crowd of Megaton, hawking Jet after dark and enjoying her youth. 

In desperate need of money and hankering for a fix of anything to get his mind off of his condition, John used what knowledge of chemistry he had learned under Doctor Hardin to make his own chems. He picked up Jet in days- a skill which he would quickly perfect. Separated from the chems in the Doctor’s arsenal, John was quick to use his own product, starting an addiction which he still struggles with nearly twenty years later. His first experiments with producing other chems of his own creation didn’t go nearly as well, though this would change as John got more practice with his craft.

Before long, Megaton became a bleak place for John and his sister. The same old people, the same old rust, and the same old judging glances cast by those who disapproved of what they were doing. John and Catherine had established a small lab and home, where John cooked Psycho and Jet and Catherine sold it. Things were good for now- plenty of caps and enough chems to never come down, if one wished. However, inevitably, things turned sour when John made an honest mistake and caught the lab on fire- a fire which then spread to a nearby house and killed a young man within. It had been time to get out of that trap of a town anyway.

That night would later haunt John, but at the time he was too out of it to care. John and Catherine left with a couple of friends immediately, with everyone encouraging John to set up shop somewhere else and keep turning product out. Young, armed, and hooked on chems, the small group ended up just where you would expect them. Within days John was watching as his friends robbed caravaners of their goods and did what they pleased with them. The raider gang they had fallen in with swiftly fell under Catherine’s charismatic control, and John quickly built up his famous tolerance to witnessing acts of cruelty.

John’s next few years were a chem-fueled haze. Most of the time he stayed back at the gang’s base and cooked, both food and otherwise. He was comfortable, and he brought joy to those all around him through his craft. His sister and her underlings provided John with whatever he needed, within reason, and John had enough time on his hands to amass a small personal library, which he still sorely misses to this day. It was during this time that John developed what he considers to be his greatest (and only) contribution to this world- Breeze.

Breeze was a chem of John’s own creation. Powerfully psychedelic, it was unlike anything anyone in the Capital Wasteland had felt before. John had met his first and only love. 

Eventually, his raider gang’s peddling of this new chem lead to a bit of fame within the unwashed circles of the CW’s raiders. A new age of prosperity came for John and his sister, paving the way for their entry into the slaver settlement of Paradise Falls, where the wicked lived like princes. John fit right in, or at least that’s what he told himself.

Here, John and his new concoction were welcomed with open arms and open purses. John quickly accrued a bit of wealth, and his sister, who turned out to be a frighteningly good slaver, followed suit. John’s lab was magnificent, albeit too large for he alone to operate, leading to Catherine’s giving her younger brother the greatest gift he would ever receive- Edgar.

Edgar was a brute of a man, well over six feet, built like a box truck, and horribly mutated. Catherine had picked the oaf up when she saw him being used as a pack animal by his caravaning father. As it soon turned out, Edgar wasn’t too much smarter than a pack animal either, but John still took to him quickly. Even though he felt bad for keeping a slave at first, he welcomed the company. Edgar was entirely unlike those that John surrounded himself with. He was simple, innocent, and untouched by the psychological horrors of the wastes, and John was fascinated by it all.

As John put Edgar to work around to lab performing more menial tasks, John started to theorize about just what he could accomplish with Breeze. Always possessing a flirtatious interest with the human mind and its treatment, John would go on to subject Edgar to chem-assisted ‘treatment’, attempting to mold the oaf into what John wanted him to be. It worked, in a way, with John eliciting an intense loyalty, but also commanding great fear from the man three times his size. John has done many things for Edgar since that day, both great and unspeakable. He helped teach Edgar things he was not during childhood, bettering his speech and understanding of the world. He even went so far as to teach him to read. However, he also meddled in Edgar’s mind in irreversible ways. He implemented ‘switches’, fabricated occult, chem-assisted lies to keep him in check, and completely brought Edgar under his personal control. Within a year, John had created a companion who was loyal to the death.

As the years went by, John became convinced that he would die content within Paradise Falls. He was surrounded by sin, but that was the only life he had ever known. Away from any medical help, John adopted a strict regimen of chemicals to help control the episodes his heart gave him, and from that day until now, John never went another day without at least some chem use. Eventually, disaster struck one final time for John when he fouled a  batch of Jet, leading to three overdoses in Paradise Falls… one of them being his sister’s.

John was destroyed. He had killed his sister, the only person who he didn’t have to drug-up to care about him. The person who had given him everything. With Paradise Falls itself being threatened by increasing Brotherhood influence as well, John knew there was nothing left for him. On a whim, John took what he and Edgar could carry and hired a Talon Company soldier by the name of Steve Cooper to take him far away from the regrets of his past. As it turned out, Steve would turn out to be a major player in John’s new life, remaining his traveling companion for the next few years as the three continued to travel north. With all of them restless, they drifted from place to place. Quincy, Goodneighbour, Diamond City, and more. John introduced Breeze to the Commonwealth, albeit in smaller quantities than back home, which led to involvement with various raider gangs and even a flirting with Railroad operations before its destruction. Most recently, John, Steve, and Edgar all ran with the Dunwich raiders, living above the alien rumblings of those dark depths. However, it may just be time for all of them to settle down.
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